Chapter 122: Accumulation

"As you suspected, I am not as young as I appear. After that war—or perhaps the experiment—my biological functions seemed to simply come to a halt. Aside from that, however, I am just like any other person."

"I still die if I don't eat or drink, I still die from lethal wounds, and if I were to head into the future, I would likely die at the hands of the specters."

"Beyond that, my only unique trait is a strange intuition regarding the future—an ability to distinguish, roughly speaking, whether the future holds good or bad outcomes."

Dr. Chen read Juno's expression with ease. He was an unremarkable man; before the war, he had been nothing more than a minor, overlooked figure. So many had sacrificed themselves in that conflict, marching toward death with the ideals of the Yellow River and the Yangtze in their hearts, that it was only by chance that someone like him was left to take the stage and lead.

For victory, there must be sacrifice.

Dr. Chen was the one standing atop a mountain of corpses, looking down at it all.

The Canglong Federation had won, but what was the cost?

"That's not right. Analyzing the battle reports, your casualties weren't that high. You defeated the enemy with a perfect plan; your losses should have been minimal. What does this have to do with the specters? Could it be that they are trapped in time? Have they formed a special field? What you call a subspace?"

Juno realized something was amiss.

For entities like specters to manifest, the conditions must be incredibly harsh. To put it bluntly, within the Artificial Divine Realms, such things are considered low-tier. They aren't easy to mass-produce. If the human race hadn't been locked away from their innate energy and psychic affinity, dealing with specters at the start would be like a father disciplining a son; they would never have been allowed to spiral out of control to the point of devouring people at will.

Many worlds share the saying that humans fear ghosts three parts, but ghosts fear humans seven. There are countless ways to slay them—martial arts, Taoist sorcery, or even science.

Dr. Chen snapped his fingers; the question had cut to the core.

"People are indeed trapped in time, but it isn't them. It is us."

"You?"

"No, all of us."

"..."

Dr. Chen dropped another bombshell. The psychic practitioners were also caught in the loop. At the very least, Lan Yi had realized this and ventured into the future to gather evidence and certain perceptions.

"How many times has this been?" Even as slow as he was, Juno grasped the gravity of the situation.

"Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? It's possible. We have no accurate way to measure it; even atomic clocks can only monitor the scope of the cycle. However, I feel that for you, it hasn't been many times, because I still feel a sense of 'novelty' regarding you." Dr. Chen trusted his instincts, or perhaps he preferred to trust the world that the psychic practitioners hailed from.

If there was a way to come, there was surely a way to go. Leaving this desperate, wretched world was one such method.

"But there is one place that certainly has the exact answer."

"The moon." Juno gritted his teeth. That wily old demon Lan Yi—he must have found a shortcut to preserve his memories. No wonder he acted so strangely, even appearing unmotivated.

"Correct. The current scope of the time loop has not yet spread to the moon. Every time we discover the truth, we do our best to launch a few spacecraft, using brute-force methods to leave drones and materials on the moon, documenting our efforts and the outcomes of each cycle by building an underground base on the far side."

"Do you not have contact with the moon?"

"I don't know which cycle it started in, but we lost contact. That is why we must send someone up there to resolve the issue." Dr. Chen suspected that the lunar base might also be infested with specters. He just didn't know how they had gotten there.

"Let’s return to the origin of the specters," Juno said, steering the conversation back.

"The origin of the specters was not a direct result of us finding the optimal solution. To be precise, they did not appear in the first few cycles after our victory."

Dr. Chen's explanation was convoluted. He tried to avoid jargon, complex vocabulary, and long, difficult sentences, ensuring Juno understood exactly what he was expressing.

"To win, we once initiated a loop in a local theater of war."

"We tested it, it worked, so we promoted it, and then we used it everywhere."

"The scope of the loop grew from a single city to a province, a nation, then a continent. Many of the 'leap-frog' technologies were developed when the loop was still controllable—like materials science, which was essentially using massive amounts of time and resources to gamble on success."

Even without Dr. Chen saying it explicitly, Juno could imagine what those years were like. Time loops were useful. In research and development, they couldn't help but keep using them, enjoying the acceleration brought by "cheating," avoiding detours and pitfalls in a quest for daily breakthroughs.

It was a massive engineering acceleration.

But...

When the ecstatic Canglong Federation accelerated during their post-war development, they encountered an engineering accident. It is impossible to trace which cycle the accident originated in—those records might not even survive on the lunar base—but essentially, the engineering went out of control. The scope of the loop suddenly expanded to cover the entire Earth.

The entire planet fell into a prison of time.

This brings us to how the Canglong Federation managed such a dream-like power. They had discovered a strange space deep within the northwestern desert, near the Ear of the Earth.

Stripping away the chaotic discovery and verification process, the Federation was amazed to find that if a human with a sufficiently firm will entered that space, they could expand it, thereby increasing the range of the loop.

The requirement for a "firm will" was incredibly high. In times of peace, even soldiers could not claim their wills were absolutely firm. But in wartime, it was different. Facing the risk of national extinction during the Third World War, the Federation took a desperate gamble, pulling many people—especially soldiers—into that space. Dr. Chen was one of them. Back then, they entered without question, shouting slogans for the Yellow River and the Yangtze.

There were many outcomes for those who entered that space. Some went missing, some lost their memories, some died instantly, some became catatonic, and some seemed perfectly fine. But regardless of the outcome, those people shared one common trait: they had lost their "possibility."

In their own words: once you enter, you lose all possibility. All possibilities vanish, relative to the... things within that space.

When the loop spiraled out of control, it was certainly despairing for those in the know. But for the average person, the general public, it seemed to matter little. They continued to live normal lives, day after day, year after year, as if nothing had changed.

Yet, within the loop, there is one thing that accumulates.

That is emotion.